Archive for June, 2010

ï»¿ï»¿ï»¿The Ohio Linux Fest will be on September 10-12, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio.Â There is now a one-week extension for Call for Partiicipation.

If any of you are in the Ohio area and would like to give a talk about openSUSE, we encourage you to register your talk proposal here.

From the website:

We’re looking for speakers who can address a wide range of topics related to Linux and open source. Talks suited for beginners or experts, or in-between, are welcome. We’re particularly interested in talks on current topics like Android, MeeGo, KVM, Python for System Administration, WordPress, GNOME, KDE, Ruby on Rails, Django, Linux distributions, and more.e:

So let’s get openSUSE noticed there and spread the word about our newest release, openSUSE 11.3!Â And if you’re going, let us know.Â I know of a couple of people, including myself that will try to make it there.Â It would be great if we have our own little mini-Meet & Greet while at OLF.Â Not to mention it’s always great to meet and interact with other projects in our FOSS community.

What? We plan to have a presentation of 11.3 and it’s improvements, some demo systems, and lot’s of people that care about openSUSE to talk with. You could just bring your notebook to get the latest openSUSE version installed and have a beer with the developers and other users! We will have a big barbecue and franconian beer for all :-)

For the small and big children we will have the openSUSE balloon clown visiting us, creating geekos and other animals like on Linuxtag. If you are not from Nuremberg, have a look at the party locations in the wiki, or make your own party!
Join this event on facebook.

If you cannot wait until 15.7. to get the new openSUSE 11.3, you can already download the release candidate on software.opensuse.org now.

As openSUSE 11.3 is around the corner and will be released on July 15, it’s now the right time to prepare your Launch Paty in our city or region. Gnokii just posted on the openSUSE marketing mailing list the following which should help orgainizing such an event and will help to avoid mistakes made already by others.

What’s a Launch Party?

Launch Party means an event around the fresh released openSUSE version. What kind of event is up to the organizator. Its usually an event to spread the word around openSUSE, share knowledge with others and get people on the openSUSE train. (more…)

Please fasten your seat belts, the touch down area is in sight we do have clear view and smooth weather conditions. So we expect a smooth landing for the release of openSUSE 11.3 on July 15, 2010. Let’s polish and fine-tune openSUSE 11.3 now. Get the RC1 from our software portal right now!

As usual the most annoying bugs are listed here. But at least till release time coolo couldn’t find more then one bug in this category. Good sign towards a great release in July.

As announced previously, the openSUSE Board and its Strategy Team have worked on three strategic proposals to define the direction of openSUSE’s future, as a Project, Community and distribution.Â Each strategy proposal includes the same community statement.Â We will therefore discuss the community statement and the three strategies separately.

Focused Discussion

To have a focused discussion, we like to handle the discussion as follows on both opensuse-project mailing list and the openSUSE forums:

Present today all three strategy proposals and the community statement, they are available on the wiki.

Figure out which strategy proposal is best, so pros and cons of each ones.

Note that each statement contains three lists of activities describing current activities the openSUSE Project does and possible future activities (or tasks).Â The first list (“We need to be excellent in the following”) describes the items that we want to do really excellent and better than everybody else.Â The second list (“We will try to do the following effectively”) are needed to do but we don’t need to strive for excellence, just for effectiveness.Â The third list (“We will not focus on the following anymore”) are activities we will not do at all as part of the project but rather rely on other FOSS projects.

In the end, we’d like to have a vote by the openSUSE members on which strategy to choose.

Pavol Rusnak and Andreas Jaeger will consolidate comments and proposal changes for these in the openSUSE wiki.

The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the 1.8 and 2.0 releases of the openSUSE Build Service (OBS). It is an open package and distribution development platform that provides a transparent infrastructure that allows developers to build for various major Linux distributions and hardware architectures.

The public server http://build.opensuse.org is available for all open source developers to build packages for the most popular distributions including Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu. It is also used to build the openSUSE and MeeGo distributions.

OBS 2.0’s key features are a newly designed Web UI, anonymous access and an enhanced request system. OBS 1.8 is an update to the 1.7 release driven by the needs of the MeeGo project. Its major feature is access control enforcement. The next OBS release 2.1 will also include the access control enforcement, which is not yet in 2.0.

The completely refreshed Web UI for OBS 2.0 allows developers to work more efficiently, as data is displayed where it is expected, and the Web service loads faster and provides better access to projects, packages and meta data.

Anonymous access in OBS 2.0 to all packages and projects offers great convenience for users and more effectively promotes packages in the Build Service to the world at large, enabling search engines to index the Build Service as well. It also makes it easy to collaborate with other developers to show them patches or log files.

With OBS 2.0, review handling by a team is supported and roles can get assigned to groups instead of just to a single person.

The access control enforcement feature of OBS 1.8 allows access for projects, packages and repositories to be restricted to specified users and groups. This acknowledges privacy concerns of users.

“The openSUSE Build Service has substantial momentum in the mobile and embedded space, specifically being used now by the MeeGo project. The Linux Foundation is proud to be a strong contributor to OBS, including making substantial contributions to these new releases and features. We look forward to working with our members on OBS-related projects.â€

said Amanda McPherson, vice president marketing and developer services at the Linux Foundation.

â€œThe openSUSE Build Service 2.0 release is a significant improvement for developers, it eases collaboration with the broader open source community due to supporting anonymous access. Developers can get their job better done with the new WebUI and the faster and more flexible OBS. â€

said Michael LÃ¶ffler, chairperson of the openSUSE Board.

Users can use OBS 2.0 on the project’s public server http://build.opensuse.org or run it in their own on-premise infrastructure. Deployment is possible directly from source code or from our appliance image.

For additional information, please read the release notes for OBS 1.8 and 2.0.

We wanted to give you an update regarding the status of our Strategy Team’s release of strategy proposals for public discussion.Â Truth is, despite our best intentions to release on this date, we failed to realize each of our personal schedules leading up to this date.Â For many of us on the team, we had a number of commitments and didn’t realize that most of us had scheduling conflicts.

We are 90% done completing the wording of our proposals.Â While we could have rushed to finish everything by today, it was agreed that quality of the proposals was more important than rushing to meet a deadline.Â As such, we have agreed to postpone the release for one additional week until everyone is able to return to the table and finalize our proposals.

The new release date for the openSUSE Strategy Proposals discussion will now be on June 17th.Â We thank you for your patience and understanding and look forward to a lively discussion next week once the proposals are published.